The Mad Hatter
by DomesticatedWerewolves
Summary: The knave was always in trouble, and Alice was always there to save him when the Queen tried to cut off his head. AU. Persevereshipping Anzu x Otogi


Kana: Yay for straight pairings?

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Yugioh or lyrics. I don't even own a life, or a witty way to do the disclaimer.

**Season Four, Round Six of ComputerFreak's Yugioh Contest:** _Persevereshipping (Anzu x Otogi)._ Rated T for drug references.

**Summary: **The knave was always in trouble, and Alice was always there to save him when the Queen tried to cut off his head. AU.

OOOOO

**The Mad Hatter**

**One-Shot**

OOOOO

Life was a pack of cards. God shuffled it and laid it out on the playing field in an order than was unknown to him and waited to see what would happen. A King or a Queen meant war, while a heart meant love, or a spade meant drought or crops. But when you called it for what it was, life turned into a pile of leaves and melted away into a dream.

Welcome to a world filled with your favorite nightmares and wildest horror stories.

OOOOO

It was a sin to be born with blue eyes. That is what they used to tease her about. She was a sin, a bane, a devil, because she had blue eyes. Little children always sought out a way to make you cry, and what they said was not true, and she told herself this. But people _used_ to think it was a sin, and maybe people still did now. Did some people on the street look at her and think 'she was born with blue eyes and she must be a devil'? But she was not evil.

This got her thinking. What happened back then, when people thought eye color determined your goodness? What happened when children were born with blue eyes because of a mutation or family genes? Did they kill the children or gouge out those blue eyes? Or were they cruel, and raise those children only for them to be shunned? It was all too horrible to think about.

And this made her self-conscious about her eyes. Sometimes if someone was staring she would look down or hide her eyes behind a book or sunglasses. It would ruin her mood for the day.

So when this boy came up to her and said "You have pretty eyes" it really set her off. She instantly liked this boy.

"A lot of people have eyes, what makes mine so special?" she asked casually.

He fiddled with his hair while her friends watched. "Not many people have blue eyes. They're nice."

"You're full of it. I've heard that line a million times."

"Oh, but they are," he held her hand and said this right to her face with either a lot of nerve or a lot of heart. His eyes were green, and some of the clearest ones she had ever seen. "Is it a sin for me to say that your eyes are lovely?" It would have seemed odd for her to say the same about him.

A sin…everything was a sin. Drinking was a sin. God wants you to be dehydrated. Lovemaking was a sin. God wants you to be lonely and dispassionate. Sweets were a sin. God wants you to eat nothing but barely and grains. God was boring and mean.

OOOOO

Anzu stared out the shop window, sighing as she read the name backwards off the display window. 'SGUR' it said to her, for the shop she worked at sold rugs and tapestries. A German tune was playing on the record player, and in her opinion it was the reason why no one wanted to stay for long. A shop that had music that reminded you of Nazis really wasn't a very homey place.

She suddenly saw someone through the painted letters that read 'SGUR' and smiled. The pretty green eyes landed on her and glistened happily as Otogi held up a little flat box swaddled in a red and blue checkered cloth. Lunch.

"I thought you might be bored," he said with amusement, dipping under the counter and looking around. There were no signs of other human life in the shop, so he took it as a good omen to present her with the lunch. When Anzu opened the pop-lid she found onigiri wrapped in seaweed and an apricot. Otogi took the fruit and showed it to her. "I thought you might find this funny."

She took it from him and bit into it. The apricot was a little too young, as it was out of season, so the sweetness hurt her teeth a little. But it was the thought that counted, so she ate it until she was sucking on the stone. Otogi had already eaten one of the four onigiri wraps, and was holding out one to her. It was obviously homemade, since the rice was crumbling and the seaweed was haphazard, when she bit into it, it nearly exploded into a mess in her hand, and only her skill with Otogi's cooking made it stay together.

She thought it was as tasty as the fanciest triangle onigiri with expensive pickled vegetables in the center.

Otogi looked at the record player, scrutinizing the scratchy, cheerful German music with a critical eye. The hard beat of the drums was catchy, and he began to tap his foot to the tune. "It sounds like something they would have at a foreign carnival. Where did you get this?"

"It was in the back," Anzu replied, wiping away leftover rice from her hands on her jeans. "I like the record player better than the radio."

"No commercials," Otogi smiled, trying to lift away the needle. "We don't have to hear about merchandise that we would need to be under the influence of drugs or booze to otherwise buy." The needle went haywire and scratched across the disc with a horrible screech.

And just like that, the record was ruined. They were both glad, for they were beginning to like the German music.

OOOOO

Another day, another not-yet ripe apricot and another few minutes of aching teeth. Anzu would give him the thought and eat it, saving the stones in a tiny box.

Today was dishwashing day. And since she had no machine to do it for her, she had to scrub egg-crusted pans and pots with pasta glued to their insides. For the hard stuff she used a bit of aluminum wool, but for delicate china patterns she used a soft sponge with foamy soap.

Tonight the soap pump decided it wanted to be a bastard. The little tube that was supposed to bring up the grease-fighting liquid was jammed in the side, and every time she tried to pump all she got was a dribbly mess of orangey soap that was anything _but_ grease-fighting. But she forced out four pumps of the stuff and started using it to flake off sauce from an old plate.

As she soaped up plates and rinsed them, she read words from a dictionary, trying to pass the time.

_Penitent. _

_Desensitized._

_Jackboot. _

_Omnipresent. _

_Genocide. _

OOOOO

"Otogi?" Anzu called. His home was above his shop, and looked small on the outside, but it was big and empty on the inside. The mahogany floor was cold and it made her footfalls sound so much louder. She felt like she was in a King novel, and expected Pennywise to jump out at any moment and shatter her sanity. The sound of her footsteps reminded of a horse's, and she vaguely remembered a simpler time and asking for a pony. "Otogi?"

Then she noticed it. The dusky light from outside shined on the floor and glinted across something wet. At first, she innocently thought it was water. Then, she knelt down and ran her fingers in it, and they came away henna colored. It was cold, cold blood.

She began to follow it, like a trail of really macabre, soggy breadcrumbs. There were no paintings in the hall to follow her, or rats in the walls to make odd noises, or a killer ready to saw off her head, and because of this Anzu felt as if the moment was lost. Her stomached ached from an over-ripe apricot and more than a little fear. Fright had reduced her mind to near primitive functions, and she hadn't thought of screaming or calling Yugi or somebody who could help. All she really cared about what the blood led to.

But the blood trail cut off very abruptly, so Anzu had to double back and find where the trail began again. And she thought that, for a trail, it wasn't very straight or diligent. In fact, it seemed to cut off a lot.

That was when Anzu decided to step back and look at what she thought had been a trail, which turned out to be a phrase. _How doth the little bat._

"That's not right," Anzu murmured to herself. "It's 'how doth the little crocodile.'" This seemed very, very odd to her.

A sharp grin appeared before her. Anzu tried to remember if she had accidentally done any drugs before coming over, and couldn't recall anything. "I seriously think I did some bad crack." Nothing came to mind as the grin dissolved.

Someone began to sing. To a normal person it sounded like glass and bones grating against steel, but to Anzu it sounded like fine opera.

"_As if the land was burning like the fires of hell, and the sky was boiling under the heat of a thousand suns,_"

Anzu took a step forward. She suddenly felt hot, and the air before her wavered. The wood floor beneath her feet nearly melted her sneaker's soles. It began to crack like dead soil, with the planks becoming uneven as the dancing, floating smile returned, opening wide and revealing a bright red tongue.

"_First there was silence,_"

Cotton was shoved into her ears, or at least it felt like it. The tongue flapped in the mouth and wagged and wiggled, curling and licking those horrid teeth that were as long as her finger. Every sound was gone, save for the haunting sound of the singing. Anzu realized it was coming from the mouth.

"_What followed was a roar to wake the dead,"_

Anzu suddenly missed the cotton feeling as a rumbling that dug into her very bones and rattled her brain in her skull. She felt like her ribs would splinter. The mouth became a feline head, with high cheek bones, a thin face, and mean purple eyes.

"'s the Cheshire cat," Anzu murmured, her knees buckling. She fell to the floor limply.

"_The sound of the world tearing…_"

A great rift appeared before her, and Anzu fell into it.

"_Parents and siblings turned to cinders –_

_and so do you."_

OOOOO

Ryuuji Otogi's and Anzu Mazaki's deaths were said over the intercom at high school. Yugi thought it was disgraceful, to let everyone know that they had died the way they did, by an overdose. It hadn't even been Anzu's fault in the first place, somehow he had been slipping her some kind of narcotic drug.

What the drug did, nobody really knew. Not even the professionals knew what the shimmering, orange dust did. No one knew where Otogi had gotten it, but the box he had kept it in had had '_Mad Hatter'_ scrawled across it.

When Yugi walked home, he saw a fruit stand, with fresh apricots featured.

_They're finally in season_, Yami said sadly.

OOOOO

Kana: I have NO idea what the HELL I just wrote, but I liked it :D I don't know where those lyrics are from, only that I don't own them. And if anyone didn't know, Anzu's name means 'apricot'…I think.

Let's celebrate by reviewing.


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